


The Wings

by SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John



Series: Brokeback Series [3]
Category: Brokeback Mountain (2005), Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Brokeback 'Verse, Happy Ending, Holiday Ficlet, Letters, M/M, No angst!, Sherlock is reflecting, sherlock POV, this universe grows softer and fluffier the more I write it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-26 23:13:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17150870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John/pseuds/SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John
Summary: Sherlock Holmes picks up a pen, sits down, and decides to try his hand at writing.In other words, here are glimpses of the 'one day' that John and Sherlock hoped for in the last installment of this series <3





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [UrbanHymnal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/UrbanHymnal/gifts), [Callie4180](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Callie4180/gifts).



> For urbanhymnal, who's had a hell of a year, and has continued to be a steadfast friend to me throughout, and who has made me smile countless times.
> 
> And for bakerstmel, who has sacrificed so much time to help me, and who deserves all good things.
> 
> I just can't seem to leave these two alone. Their world feels like writing home to me, so I hope you'll indulge me and let me place a warm holiday ficlet in the middle of their not-very-fluffy world :)
> 
> The title comes from that-song-that-makes-you-cry-at-the-end "The Wings" from the Brokeback Soundtrack. Give a listen to the (superior) instrumental version [HERE.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4Hufpqq2sk)
> 
> Take care of yourself, whatever that means for you during the holidays. And I hope you enjoy.

December 24, 2004

 

I reckon John thinks I don’t ever just sit down and reflect on it all.

‘Course, he’s wrong. Wronger than an icicle in June. Than a roping calf escaping from one of my own half-hitch knots.

(It’s never happened, by the way. For the record. Not even once.)

But I do sit down and reflect on it all, thank you kindly. 

It ain’t often like he does—near every night it seems these days I come home from putting the cattle down for the night and he’s bent over some ledger or another, his pen flying across the page. I act like I don’t realize he’s suddenly picked up writing down all the things he can remember from our lives as a hobby, and he acts like he don’t know I long ago figured out it’s all for Wilma.

‘Course he may never actually give the darn things to Wilma. Journals with pages filled up to the brim may all just be permanently lost on the day we both die (We’re always saying that these days—gonna be all or nothing, neither one of us or both of us together. Morbid as a fresh grave on a wedding day, Alma Jr. would probably say. But then again, I’ve already died the once. I’m allowed to make my own rules about the second time).

Anyway, those pages filled up with his chicken-scratch hand may end up lost to the roving decades. Become scraps of old trees torn apart across the million-year-old plains. Fresh kindling for the next wave of humanity. Artifacts for the aliens.

He’d roll his eyes at me now if he were reading over my shoulder. Maybe he will one day when he inevitably finds my words tucked between his filled pages.

"You're full of shit," he'd tell me, in that way of his that is so casual and so groundbreaking all at once. The first twig breaking through the winter frost which tethers me to his voice. "Thinkin' the future civilizations gon' care about the dribble little ol' me has to say."

His accent was always much thicker than mine. Sweet molasses spread fine and thin like glass over the Wyoming plains, clinging to the crags of the rocks up on Baker.

He'd ruffle my hair then. Shake his head as he walks away.

I can feel him, even though he ain’t even in the house by my side. Though he’s out on the ranch doing the dirty work for me so I can attend to my correspondence—the letters waiting my answer from back in town. And still, he is in every particle of air about this place. Every little speck of floating dust. Every ray of the sun across the kitchen table. Every piece of squeaky wood across the floor where his feet have stepped.

He is here, and here, and here. There, and there.

So anyway, just in case his journals do find their way into Wilma’s hands one day, I figure I’d best add my own piece, speak of the devil.

I reckon I’ll start now.


	2. Chapter 2

Little W,

Got myself some things I’ve been meaning to share with you. We both know I ain’t much one for words. Well, sometimes, if you’re letting me tell you all about something in that way I know I do. I know I can ramble on. But we also both know that for years I was just ‘Quiet Uncle Scott’ —fit those words to a T —and so I can also admit to you that my fingers are gripping my pen a bit too tight.

“Just get on with it,” your granddaddy would say. 

I’ll follow his advice. It’s always done me right.

The thing is, little W, is this:

The day I met your granddaddy was the day my whole life went from mountain peak to desolate valley and straight back up again into the thick, white clouds. It was the entire breadth of life in one singular moment. Every high and every low were wrapped up in the way his hands adjusted the hat on his head. The way his boots moved through the dirt. Way he spat down by his feet as he walked back to his old truck.

There was a lot of things I didn’t know, then. A hell of a lot of things. But I knew he was _something_.

He was larger than life, your granddaddy was. Too thin in his old checkered shirt (it was his brother’s. You’ll be glad to know I figured that out before I ever even knew his name), and still wearing his old army boots on his feet, and he’d shaved that morning in the rearview mirror of his truck. It was an old green Ford with half the paint peeled off. I’ll never forget it. Wish we had a Polaroid or something to show you, but that truck’s long gone. Most everything from those days is gone, except two pairs of worn shirts.

But those are another story. Maybe your granddaddy’ll leave it for you.

He tumbled over me when I met him in that parking lot. Bowled me down into the gravel without even trying and then picked me back up by the collar of my fresh ironed shirt and set me straight. Slammed hard on my unsuspecting bones.

His eyes were storming blue. Even bluer than they are now. You would be amazed that mother nature could make someone’s eyes so desperately blue.

But then again, you once told me when you were six and a half years old that my own eyes were “crayon color, Uncle Scott.” You asked me why I’d colored in my own eyes with Crayola. It was before you started calling me Papa. Eight years and four months and twenty-two days before. Approximately.

I was afraid of him that day. That day and the whole two weeks after when we got up into the mountains. (We was ranching, herding sheep. I realize now I don’t know if we ever said. He kept the camp together and I rode my horse up to the pasture to shoo away the coyotes. Maybe you think that’s all dumb work, or uninteresting at least. I think you get the picture).

Your granddaddy fought in the war, you know. I know he ain’t told you much about those days—the years he spent in Vietnam when he was young. Your momma, though, she knows. She used to keep your granddaddy company in the kitchen of the little house your momma grew up in for a time back in Signal. It was the nights he couldn’t sleep. He’d wake up afraid. She’d crawl out of bed and join him.

You must think Signal in the 1970’s was a whole different universe than the world you live in now—your new apartment in Boston. Your life there, and your school, and your friends. I guess in some ways, Signal in the 70’s really was a whole different universe. And that itself was a whole different universe again from the world where your granddaddy had to fight with bullets in a hot jungle.

One day, I know, whether you ever see these pages or not, he’ll tell you those stories. He’s waiting until you’re older than he was when he first had to fire a gun. Right now, as I write this, you’re just a year away. 

I hope he doesn’t tell you quite all the stories he’s told me. Some of them are too heavy for you to carry. For anyone to carry. 

But I’ll carry them for him. For your granddaddy, little one, I’d carry anything.

But anyway, I was telling you as how I was afraid of him those first two weeks.

One thing I want you to remember, Wilma. Always. More than anything else you ever learn about John Watson. It’s this:

Your granddaddy is a very brave man.

Far braver than me. That war he’s gonna tell you more about one day? They asked me to fight, too. Had my name down on an official letter and everything in the mail. I read it and I saw my name and I understood what it was telling me to do. Except I never went.

But John, he got that same piece of paper in the mail, and he saw his name on it sitting at the kitchen table of his parents’ old broken farmhouse. (They were very poor. He don’t ever talk about that much now, and certainly not with you, but knowing that about John Watson makes a lot of him make more sense, so I’ll share that with you. Both his parents, your great grandparents, they died all at once. And they were desperately poor). 

And so your granddaddy saw his name there on that piece of paper. And he understood what it was telling him to do. And he went.

And that’s how come the first two weeks I ever knew your granddaddy, I was hovering at the edges of his life all scared, just waiting for a punch.

(That punch did come, once, much later than I was expecting. It came the day we came down off the mountain that summer, and neither of us thought we’d see the other ever again, and we was both afraid. Maybe you’re sitting there thinking we’re just useless fools, not opening our mouths to talk and just hitting each other instead. I reckon you’re right).

But I’ll give you another example to prove my point that your granddaddy is brave. Always give at least two examples to prove a point—but I’m sure they’re teaching you that and a thousand better things at that school of yours. You don’t need the likes of me no more filling up your head.

My second example is this:

Your granddaddy did the bravest thing on this here earth. He kissed me.

Maybe it is that you don’t want to be reading about two old ex-cowboys kissing in a tent. I don’t blame you, Little W. 

I think sometimes as how we must seem older than dirt to you—your bright eyes (you have your granddaddy’s eyes, you know, except yours are the deepest brown the world’s ever seen. The brown of the first ever horse I won a Rodeo with. Name was Slick River. Best horse I ever rode). 

You got your learning and your smarts and your humor. You’re the bright light leading the world into the future, and we’re just the past. It’s as it should be. I’d pick nobody else on this here earth to be leading the planet into the future except you, I’ll have you know.

But I digress. You can skip over this part if you like, but I figure you should know. Maybe one day, when you’re as old as I am sitting here writing you this letter, waiting for your granddaddy to come back from milking the cows (it hurts his shoulder now, to lean over and do the work. He won’t let me help him, stubborn mule. I’m sure he’ll show you his bullet scar one day, too. I’ve kissed it many times, enough I have its intricacies memorized better than the land of our own ranch. He’ll show you one day, darling. But not yet. Not now). Maybe when you’re older you’ll be curious to know the guts it took your granddaddy to kiss me.

It was different back then, little one. Different than it is now. Your granddaddy put his own sweet life on the line that night he knelt in front of me in our little tent, all lit up by the stars, and by the last embers from the campfire. I’d been playing my harmonica for him. He’d been passing his knife over a piece of wood. It was how we spent those nights, back when everything was simple, and calm, and clear. 

I can’t tell you how nervous I was. He was beautiful, your granddaddy. (Still is, but that ain’t the point). He was brave, and beautiful, and he was assured of himself in a way I’d never been for a single second of my whole life. He’d gone and done things. He’d seen half the world. He’d been with a woman. He knew and he knew and he knew.

And we were so young then, Little W. I was just a year older than you. Maybe you feel like you ain’t young now—and I guess you ain’t. You’re going off to university and living your own independent life in the big city, and I was still just a cowboy herding sheep on a mountainside. 

It shames me to think of that, now I put our lives side by side. But it was a different world, then. Maybe one day you’ll understand. Won’t look down on me for failing.

Your granddaddy, he understood everything. He understood why I preferred to spend my time herding sheep. Like he just looked at me and knew.

First time I kissed him, little one, I . . . well, it was Water Walkin’ Jesus. It was the miracle of my own heart beating without me even needing to remind it to pump the blood. It was like the first time I ever rode a horse, or swam through water, or took a breath. Maybe you can understand.

There weren’t no existence of what me and him did in my world. I didn’t know how to categorize it. How to view it. All I knew was that it was nobody’s business but ours while we were up there on Baker. 

And that kissing him was so right it near moved me to tears. Carved his lips on my soul. I could never change. Never go back.

And here’s where I gotta admit something might make you a bit mad at me to hear . . .

Last summer you was here right after your high school graduation, as you well remember. (It hurt me more than anything I ever been through on this here earth to have to miss that, Little W. I wanted to see you walk across that stage more than I want the sun to rise each morning. And I know your momma tried to explain to you why I couldn’t come, why people couldn’t see and recognize me, but it seemed you didn’t forgive me. Maybe you thought I just didn’t want to go. I woulda cut off my arm to be there, darlin. Please believe me. Your granddaddy had to hold me that night for a long, long time.)

But anyway, as I was saying, you was here visiting, and I guess as you was still a little mad at me until I ran out and hugged you in the driveway. I don’t need to remind you what I said to you there. I know you know.

You was inside with your granddaddy for a long time later, and the both of you thought I was still out with the animals. But when I was coming back I caught your bright, clear voice through the kitchen window. I beg your forgiveness I heard what you said—that I stayed still to listen.

Little W, you was asking your granddaddy why he ain’t stayed with me back in the day. Why he left and got married and had your momma. Why he lived all those years by himself. And why everyone thought I was dead. 

And I know you and I ain’t blood related and all that, but you have to know, that moment right there, hearing you ask those questions like you had them all memorized out in a list, it made me think more than anything that you somehow got some Holmes blood in you. 

I was mighty proud of you and your mind. You wanting to know and know and know.

But I was also hurting, little one. Hurting for your granddaddy. And he was gracious to you, he was, in his quiet answers. Told you as how he was just confused, and afraid, and that he didn’t really know what all of it meant. Not for a long time.

And I guess in some ways those answers are correct—the same way it’s technically correct that there’s only snow up on Baker a few months out of the year. 

But they also aren’t correct. Same way that snow is actually up there on Baker all year round. Three-hundred-and-sixty-five days as the earth makes its way around the sun. It’s there in the snowmelt in spring which cascades down the frozen moss, and in the little streams and rivers of the summer, trickling down the rocks and green, and in the rain and smears of fog that come late in the fall. That snow never leaves. Just looks different, is all.

So in that way, I need to tell you that your granddaddy ain’t afraid. 

You asked him, I heard you say it, if he feels bad for letting me down. If he regrets that he let me live alone. Why he left me.

And this here’s the truth you need to know more than anything else:

He ain’t never left me, Wilma.

And the second truth:

He loves your momma almost more than he even loves me.

People died, little one. People like him and me. They’re still dying. Maybe not in your Boston, perhaps. But in Signal. Up ‘round near Big Horn. People die.

Listen to me. Your granddaddy and I smacked into each other before we even understood the way the world worked. Before we understood ourselves. There wasn’t . . . there wasn’t a path for us to follow. No roads and no reigns. No clear cut signs saying ‘take this direction with your life’ and ‘now turn left’.

And I won’t lie to you. Driving away from him all those years, those years we was living so far apart . . . Every single time I would ask him to follow me. To come back with me. It stung like fire in my chest to drive away from him. That we ain’t had our ranch together decades earlier than we did. 

Those moments hurt him too. Maybe even more than they hurt me. You must understand that. We was a part of each other before we even realized it had happened. It was hard to breathe when we were apart. Literally. Physically. It was damn hard to beathe.

And still, every single time he got back in his truck, and he shook it all out, and he went back to work to provide for your momma—her and her sister and your Grandma. He took your momma to the new pool a few towns over. He asked her how was school.

He made his choices, Little W. And I made mine. And at the end of it all, I’d die again a thousand times over, I’d drive away from him again and again, if it means we get to keep _you_ in our lives. I don’t regret a single second of anything. 

And I know, because I asked him—neither does he.

I can’t imagine a world without you in it, little one. I would rather live in secret for the rest of our lives than live in such a place as that. 

But then again, I guess we already do live in secret, as you maybe know. Maybe you’ve guessed, on account of the last few years, all the little stories you’ve gone and heard, maybe you have your own idea that yourself and your momma is the only two people on the planet who know what your granddaddy is to me. That I have loved him deeper than I know my own soul since I was nineteen. That he lies beside me, and I beside him.

That we is as husbands and wives. Do you truly understand that? All that that entails? Some days I wonder if I even want you to understand all that. If I’d rather it’s all just a blur in your head. Just ‘granddaddy and papa share a house’ and leave it at that.

But I might regret it when I’m floating across the plains as a ghost after I die, so I’ll clarify it for you now. I’ll put it down in writing once and for all, for the civilizations and the aliens all to know:

I, Sherlock Holmes, have taken John Watson for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live. I have shared with him, body and mind. I have slept in his arms.

There. That’s enough.

I think sometimes maybe you wonder why we don’t just up and move. Maybe in the decades between me writing this and you reading it, you’ll continue to think the same. 

Well, little one, it’s the mystery of life, ain’t it? Why we sometimes hold on to things that can hurt us. Maybe you’re right. Maybe if we up and moved to a big city like Boston, the two of us, in the right place and the right time, we could be ourselves out in the streets. I could start a new life for myself—one where I didn’t die back in Amarillo. I could take your granddaddy’s hand in the park.

You’ll probably spend many years thinking we’s just two nutcases. Outdated and backwoods and thinking the rest of the world still hates us. Not realizing that young people like you are changing things.

We do realize, darlin. We realize, and your granddaddy is so proud of you he got choked up talking to me about it just the other night. That photo you mailed us of you at that rainbow parade. We may be too backwoods to get them internet cables you’re begging us to get, so as you can send us letters without having to use paper.

But we ain’t backwoods enough to know you ain’t out there changing things.

And in spite of all of that . . . Wilma, this is home. Maybe one day you’ll find your home. I hope to all hell that you do. (Hell was one of the first words I ever said in front of you, but you don’t remember. Your granddaddy scolded me for cursing in front of a baby, but your momma had my back. Looks like you turned out just fine, and I said hell plenty of times in front of you since).

But anyway, when you find your home, and you _will_ find it, I know. I think you’ll understand. 

Home is where I first saw John Watson step down out of his truck, where I held him for the first time and felt his skin. Where I fell in love before I even realized what that meant. Home called to me again and again for the last forty years, never forgetting my name, never not finding my new address. It called to me to come back, come back, come home. To be in your granddaddy’s arms under the stars, and breathe in the air beside him, and taste his whiskey in the green fog. 

There were nights, Wilma . . . I won’t feel shame in admitting to you that there were nights when I thought as maybe I didn’t want to see the sunrise the next day. Some of those are stories for you for another time. Partly because you’re young, and partly because I’m just afraid. Afraid maybe your eyes will dim a bit next time you see me if you knew all I’d done. The mistakes I’ve made. The things I’m ashamed of which only your granddaddy knows.

But for now, just know this, and believe it as best as you can:

Baker Mountain, and the thought of seeing your granddaddy, those two things are the only reasons on this earth why I’m still here. Why I made it long enough to meet you one day.

Remember that when you wonder, years down the line, why we won’t just move. Remember what I’ve shared with you here. Maybe you think Baker is just the same as any old mountain, just old creeks and camping sites. Handfuls of goats and a few old trees.

But those things kept me alive, little one, silly as they may seem. And they’re the only things on earth that witnessed me falling in love for the first and only time, seeing as how I couldn’t never share those memories with anybody else (until you). 

Baker witnessed it all. It’s our home.

Speaking of that day—the day I met you— it was the most important day of my whole life aside from meeting your granddaddy. 

That day I first ever held you in my arms. You was the first baby I ever met, did you know? The very first one. You was crying up a storm, not settling for anyone, and your momma placed you in my arms, trusting as the sun, and you stared up at me and quieted like the whisper of the dawn wind. The way it used to hush against the sides of the pup tent your granddaddy and I used to share.

(Your momma is the most remarkable woman I ever did meet, by the way. Those times these days you argue with her over the phone—as is your right to do, I reckon, as a person of seventeen. Keep that in mind. She is a remarkable, remarkable woman. Maybe you could ask your granddaddy one day about how your momma come to know about all this.)

I knew, then, as you looked up at me and I held you. Knew right then I didn’t regret a single night over the last twenty years I’d had to spend alone. Away from John Watson. 

Because John Watson helped make you.

Actually, I fear I’ve told a bit of a lie. There’s a third most important day of my life I’ve gone and forgotten. I tear up now even conjuring up this third moment—everything I can remember in sharpest detail: the rain patters outside, and the way you folded your hands on the kitchen table of our house. The lock of hair that had fallen into your eyes. Your pearly white thirteen-year-old teeth in your braces. Your granddaddy’s drop biscuits cooling on top of the stove. 

That day you finally asked me why I hadn’t ever gone and found myself a wife—question I’d been dreading since I first held your soft head in the palm of my hand. 

And then your granddaddy, your beautiful, immensely brave granddaddy, he cut off the sputtering answer I was trying to give, and he held your hand, and he told you that I didn’t need no wife. That I had him. 

And because you’re a genius, you asked if we was like brothers, then. (A reasonable assumption. You’d never seen anything between us, after all. And sometimes we shared boots).

And I’ll never forget the way the earth stood still when your granddaddy told you no, we were not like brothers, then. He said words I thought I’d die before I ever heard: that he and I were just like your momma and Kurt. That there’d be no wives.

And then, because you’re even smarter than a genius, you asked why in hell you’d been calling me Uncle Scott all this time when really I was your Papa.

Your _Papa_.

Little W, you’ll never know. You’ll never understand what that meant, those two little words. It’s the only thing in this whole letter I know I can’t ever try to explain.

Now I’ve gone and rambled for the better part of these here pages, and I hear the sounds of your granddaddy knocking his boots to come back inside. He’ll need me to rub out his shoulder later. Need me to cook us some supper to end out the night.

And in case I don’t ever get the writer’s urge upon me again, I’ll tell you this, Little W. My parting words to you:

Your granddaddy is the most beloved person in the whole world. He stands alone on the highest mountain peak as every breath I take, every choice I make, every sound from my lips, they all travel to the farthest reaches of these here mountains to cover his skin. To follow him. To protect him. To adore him. To keep him close.

Or he used to stand alone on that highest peak, rather. Until along came you.

 

\- Papa


	3. Chapter 3

December 25, 2007

 

It took me three whole years, Little W, but that writing bug done bit me again. Take me or leave me, it seems that here I am.

Your granddaddy is sound asleep by my side as I write. I don’t need no lamp on to see my own words—there’s golden light already streaming in through our bedroom window, cascading over the blanket your momma done knit us for Christmas. It reminds me of the way the light would smear across the oil fields at the end of the day, painting huge strokes of gold and purple into the inky black like sunken pieces of lace.

A decade ago, if someone woulda told me I would write something all flowery like that, Christ. I woulda spat at their feet. Woulda used some language far too creative for your ears, although I guess you ain’t a child anymore. That much is clear.

Maybe that’s what age does to me, though. Make me write and ramble on about things that have no use at all in a cowboy’s letters. And what age does to your granddaddy is make him sleep past sunup. I ain’t never known him to sleep past sunup in all our long years together. Not until these last six months.

He looks young when he sleeps. You wouldn’t know this—you’ve never seen him like this. Only ever seen him up and agile and taking up the whole vast space in a room, just like he always seems to do without even trying to make it so. Brighter than the sun. Studier than old Baker’s sides.

But like this . . . with the sun on his eyelashes, the stubble on his cheeks. One hand curled under his chest. Some of his hairs grown grey . . .

I’ll let myself be soft in front of you, little one. Not anybody else except your granddaddy can say they’ve seen me be soft. They’ve all seen me rodeo, and work in the oil fields, and wrangle a horse. 

But I’ll be soft for you, as soft as your little gold hairs were the first time I ever held you in my arms. And I’ll tell you that I grow warm inside thinking that I’m the only person on this here that gets to see John Watson like this. Unguarded and open. Vulnerable. At rest.

Sleeping like this, he looks like he did that first summer we ever shared. And there was one winter over those long years we spent apart, one Christmas, when we shared a cabin your granddaddy borrowed from a ranch hand. We slept in a real bed instead of a tent. He looks now like he did that night.

I’ve been thinking the last few years since I wrote you before . . . thinking that maybe you’ll think it’s odd one day for me to talk of those years. Odd, or even more worrisome—inappropriate. Those years before your granddaddy divorced from Grandma, and he was in essence cheating on his vows with her in order to run up to the mountains to be with me. Maybe it is that you resent us a bit for that.

It were only ever twice a year, little one. Sometimes just once. But it was cheating all the same. 

I told you in my last letter that I had no regrets. But I’ve come to realize that I do have one—one brilliant one. I only met your Grandma one single time, did you know? Just the once. Was the first time I saw your granddaddy after five years of being apart, when we never thought we’d see each other ever again. 

He kissed me at the bottom of the stairs outside their house before we even said hello.

Your momma told me years later that she didn’t see the kiss, but she seen him pulling me under the stairwell from the window, and she’d thought we was getting in a fight. And she told her momma, your Grandma, to come and look.

It makes me nauseous to think what she might have seen. Makes me hate myself. What I am. What I decided to do.

So yes, my one regret. My one regret is hurting your sweet Grandma. Causing pain to Alma. Maybe one day I’ll grow brave like your granddaddy and reach out and tell her. Or at least reach out and ask her if she’d want to hear my apology. That would be a good start.

But enough about all that softness and sadness. 

I’m here writing to you again because you done visited us yesterday for Christmas Eve supper. And because you done brought your young man with you.

Little Wilma, sweet Wilma, I won’t know how to tell you what it meant to your granddaddy that you brought your young man to meet us. Seems just yesterday you was a warm little lump in my arms. That you was a ten year old chasing rabbits across our farm. “Uncle Scott! Catch me, Uncle Scott!” you would call out to me. You remember that? You would run and run and beg me to catch you with my rope.

I always missed you until the very last try. I think even then you knew I was missing you on purpose.

But anyway, when John and I heard you was bringing your man, I fully thought I was about to hear you say the words ‘Uncle Scott’ again for the first time in a million years. Didn’t blame you one bit for it. Maybe a small part of me even missed that role—missed the way you would say it when you was missing your two front teeth, and you would lisp. Missed the way it made me anonymous, in a way. That I could just fade back into the wallpaper and you’d never really notice I was gone. I could leave you to your life like it was meant to be and not intrude.

Your granddaddy would be upset seeing me write that. One thing he always told me, again and again, “We’re in this,” he’d tell me. Still tells me to this day. “No ducking out. We’re in this. It’s you and me.”

Well, actually, he doesn’t really tell me all that in so many words. But I can read between the lines. I know it’s what he means.

So no, I’d never fade back into the wallpaper, even if I were kept Uncle Scott until the end of time. Not after what I did to granddaddy before we ever got this here ranch. But that’s a different point.

Anyway, last night:

Then John opened the door to you, and you pulled your young man in by the hand, and by God little one, you looked at him and you said, “I want you to meet my granddaddy. And this here’s my papa.”

Did you notice your granddaddy took my hand, then? Behind the door? First I thought as he was afraid—you know we ain’t never been introduced like that to anyone before. Not a soul. Then I noticed the glow in his eyes, did you see it too?

Little W, your granddaddy ain’t had that look in his eyes since I showed him our farm for the very first time. The house I built for him with my own bare hands. 

You told us as how you were planning to spend a semester abroad, you said. You and your young man going on the same program to Japan so he can visit his own grandparents. 

Japan—imagine! A Holmes (because you are a Holmes, you know you’re a Holmes) going all the way clear across the world to Japan! I know you saw your granddaddy’s eyes grow big as saucers. Sometimes I think he forgets there’s a whole other world that exists outside Baker and Boston and his jungle dreams. Sometimes I do, too.

And you told your young man as how I work for the sheriff station, as if I had myself a badge and a payroll and everything. Your granddaddy grabbed my knee under the table like a silent laugh.

Little one, one day I’ll show you what I really do for the sheriff station. The stacks of letters I write and answer—because I think everyone in the state of Wyoming knows that if you want “Mr. Watson” to actually solve your little mystery, you still gotta use a regular old pen and paper. I can see you rolling your eyes.

Anyway, what I really wanted to tell you was this:

You looked happy with him. Mighty bright and happy. It must have been what my own face looked like the first time your granddaddy ever told me he liked my harmonica playing. It was before I’d ever even so much as brushed against his arm, but I’ll tell you. I glowed. 

After you left last night, your granddaddy pulled me onto the couch. Said we could do all the cleanup later. Said I needed to sit down for five seconds and actually relax. He reminds me to do that, else I’d forget.

So I did. Maybe you don’t want to hear this part, but maybe . . . one day . . .

I may as well write it down. Ain’t no law against you skipping lines. 

Little W, he held me in his arms in front of the fire. Stroked my hair the way I like. (You used to pull on my curls when you was just a toddler, you remember? Used to yank them with your hands and laugh and laugh. I’ll never forget).

Lying in your granddaddy’s arms is a gift I never feel I deserve. Sometimes, lying there, I think of his body lying in a jungle across the world. How limp he must have looked right after he was shot. If he grew cold. Maybe you’ll think that’s morbid of me, and I suspect it rather is. But I can’t help thinking about it—how grateful I am that he’s still here to hold me. And I remember the first time I ever saw his scar when we was kids, how shocking and raw it looked. That was the first of a thousand times that I kissed it.

We didn’t say anything for a long time there on the couch. I suspect our hearts started to beat in tune. Maybe that sounds fanciful, but I reckon I could’ve got out a watch and timed it all to prove the truth of my words.

I remember once, right after you learned exactly what we were, you asked us how come you never seen us hugging each other. How come you rarely seen us even talk more than a few words to each other over all those years. You said to us, “How come y’all don’t ever kiss? Or argue? Or say ‘I love you’?”

We laughed about it all in the moment, if I remember right, but later . . . later I felt like I’d been stabbed through the chest. Like one of my old rodeo horses done reached back and kicked me square in the throat. I wondered if I wasn’t treating your granddaddy right. If maybe he wanted those things, if he thought you didn’t understand after all, if maybe we wasn’t setting the right example. If we wasn’t really _real_.

Then I realized, little one, you were seeing our love just the same. You were seeing what we were, take it or leave it. Better or worse.

We have our own language, your granddaddy and I. I can read his lips without him even talking. I can read the colors of his eyes, and the twitch of his fingers, the set of his jaw. 

Maybe you still think all that silence ain’t natural. That it’s odd you never to this day have seen us hug or kiss. But I think you of all people don’t doubt us, all the same. I hope to God, little one, that you don’t. 

But anyway, we was silent there for a long time, that way we normally are, in those hours after you and your young man left. I watched the embers die, and he stroked my hair, and his chest and thighs were sturdy and warm. 

And then he said, so soft I could barely hear, “I reckon I might tell Wilma soon about when you died.”

Maybe to anyone else on earth, maybe even to you, his voice woulda sounded totally normal, like he was just speaking low.

But to me? 

To me, I heard a heaving ocean of endless sorrow.

I put my hand on his chest and felt his heartbeat racing through his shirt (you know he didn’t just wear that nice flannel shirt for you? He still dresses up for me, every time we sit down for a nice home cooked dinner. Washed and polished and tucked in tight. He rubs on cologne and brushes over his hair. I adore it).

I hummed. “You reckon so?” I said.

I can see you now, shaking your head that I didn’t say more. That I didn’t express any surprise, or ask any questions, or spur him on. 

But then again, maybe by the time you read this, you’ll understand our language, too You’ll hear all I really said.

His hand stilled in my hair. He was as still as I’d ever felt him. “Feels odd she don’t know that I been a mourner,” he said. “That she knows you’re gone and dead to the rest of the world, but she don’t know that I was once . . . I was once part of the rest of the world. For that year.”

Little one, I nearly cried right then and there. Maybe you can’t even picture me crying, but I assure you it’s happened a handful of times. Always in the arms of John Watson. Only with him.

I’m sure by the time you read this, if you ever do, he’ll have told you all he planned to say. And so maybe you can somehow imagine one memory that is seared into my mind forever, which haunts me still in the dead of night:

It was his face.

Your granddaddy’s face in the moments after he opened his trailer door, that day I came back to him to tell him about the ranch. Those few seconds before he recognized me standing there, and I suddenly saw, all at once, what my ‘harmless’ little idea had done to him—me disappearing for a bit, building a house, showing him we could have a life together where we wouldn’t be known. Me showing back up and surprising him like it was all just a game of hide and seek. Like he’d laugh and say ‘where you been’ and think that a new ranch sounds nice. That we could give it a try.

But I saw all at once it hadn’t been harmless at all. That I had destroyed him, wrecked and ruined him. Left your brave, beautiful granddaddy a complete shell of the man I’d known.

I hadn’t realized, little one. If you blame me for anything, and you have a mighty right to, please understand. I just didn’t know. What we had and what we were. What it all really meant. Even after all those years of what we had going on, I still didn’t fully _know_.

Not until your granddaddy opened that trailer door.

Anyway, I sat up in his arms on the couch and kissed him. Really kissed him, the way you’ve never, ever seen us do. Your granddaddy’s eyes were wet. There was a trail of water on his cheek.

“I want her to know,” I told him. “Please, I want her to know.” 

“I missed you,” he suddenly breathed, and it sounded like a groan. I can count on one hand the times I’ve ever heard your granddaddy sound as weary as that. As stuffed full of emotion.

One of those times had been just after you was born, after I’d rather lost it all at the thought of you always just knowing me as Uncle Scott. And he’d taken my face in his hands and told me I just had to hope for one day, maybe one day. 

He told me to be strong, he did. And I didn’t have the words to beg him for some of his strength, because I didn’t have enough of my own. It’s hard to speak when the bravest man on earth believes that you can be strong.

(You gave me that day, little one, by the way. Never ever go doubting your worth. You gave us that day.)

I called your granddaddy by his name and held his face. “It’s you and me,” I said, putting it into words for the first time.

He nodded. He understood.

And then I held him, just as he’d done for me. And the fire whispered away to ashes and smoke. And that’s how I spent the best Christmas Eve I ever had in my life just last night. And how you were a part of it.

Your granddaddy’s stirring now. He’ll want his coffee—thick and black and hot and first thing in the morning, just like always. I was the only person he ever trusted to make it right for him until you made him a cup when you was only nine. He said it was the best cup he ever had, and I think I’ll always resent you a bit for that, darlin.

I’ll go to him now. He needs me, as maybe you well know by now.

 

-Your Papa


	4. Chapter 4

I didn’t end up getting John his coffee after putting down my pen on Christmas morning.

Something else happened entirely. Something which I’ve never thought to put into writing before. In all honestly, would rather live in a hole or bury my face in the dirt than ever even think about in the light of day before, let alone write down.

But maybe it was the fact it was Christmas morning, and even though we ain’t had a single present, and no tree, and no lights strung up . . . even though Christmas morning to us is indistinguishable from every other morning, something about it made me want to remember every second. Not let it fade in my mind.

So here I am. Pink burning in my cheeks and my fingers shaky. Here I am.

John Watson is breathtaking when he wakes up in the late morning. I’d never tell him that, not in a million years, but he’s like the first warm breeze of spring rushing through the frozen canyons, brushing away the top layer of frost from the pines like a puff of breath.

He fills me, like he done filled me the first time I ever looked at him under the brim of my hat. The way he’d been standing in the gravel, his chin held high. He fills me up whole.

“Sherlock,” he mumbled, still half asleep. He reached for me across the sheets, the hair on his bare chest shimmering gold in the heavy sun.

I couldn’t resist. I’ve never been able to resist.

“ _I wish I knew how to quit you,_ ” I’d once said to him. Now I can’t even imagine those words coming true. I’d rather go back to Amarillo and find a man with a tire iron and beg him to get me for real than live in a world where I had successfully quit John Watson.

He ain’t something to quit. It’d be like saying I wish I knew how to quit breathing oxygen. How to quit blinking. How to quit being Sherlock Holmes. Quit being papa.

I pulled him close to me. He smelled like cinnamon from the cake Junior had baked for Wilma to take to us the night before. His hair smelled like the first time I ever roped a calf from the back of a horse, or the first time I saw the way the firelight played across his face from over a campfire. First time I ever woke up in a tent with John Watson beside me, and I realized I was fucked for the rest of my life. That I was doomed.

Except I ain’t doomed—not at all. 

And I wasn’t that Christmas morning either. No, instead the soft scent of straw and mud streaming down Baker’s sides and across our farm had crushed itself into his kneecaps, around his wrists. There was a horsehair clinging behind his left ear. A faint mark from my lips fading away into his strong neck.

I stroked the line of his eyebrow with my thumb, and he hummed in that way he does when he’s coming up for air after a deep sleep.

“You’re a beautiful thing,” I whispered, shocked I even let something like that pass through my lips. 

But he wasn’t shocked. His eyes fluttered open, deep, bursting plains of royal blue, the way the sky sinks across Wyoming and dips behind the peaks to hide from the moon.

He grinned at me—a wrinkly smile fitting perfectly into the velvet lines of his face. “Should see yourself,” he murmured.

Beautiful. Beautiful.

We were both naked, as we’re wont to do, even in the dead of winter. I pulled him by his lower back against my skin, fitting him perfectly into the curves of my body in that way I know he’s meant to fit. He was heavy and warm. He wrapped himself around me, consumed me, as if I’d been missing a huge piece of myself before he was lying right there. Right in my arms.

Hundreds of times I’ve held him like that. Thousands of times. And every time I’m suddenly nineteen again sitting across a fire, dumbstruck and awestruck and all the other kinds of struck you can be. Lovestruck. Luststruck. Struck by a lightning bolt named John.

The simplest name for a lightning bolt to have. The most unassuming. But Lord, it got me good. Held me tight for forty plus years in the closest embrace.

“Come here,” I whispered. It was the last thing either one of us said for a while.

There was a rhythm to his chest, the rises and falls of his breathing. He pulled me into the pulse of his body, brought my lips down to his, chapped and dry. He was hungry for it that morning—I could tell by the rasp of his breaths. The firm grip of his fingers. The sigh in his mouth. He was pushing his hot air down my own throat, coating my sleepy tongue in a delicious whisper. 

He was swelling between his thighs. Soft and thick and unhurried. Completely at ease. The simple fact of it brought water to my eyes.

There ain’t words to describe how it feels, still feels, when he kisses me like that. Deep and open like he’s living off my lips alone. Like we’re still young and bright with the whole world ahead of us, dreaming of whiskey springs, and of rodeos, and of this and this and this. Dreaming, instead of hovering near sixty and hiding away in the dark.

Except it wasn’t dark. And he wasn’t hiding.

He pushed the sheets off himself with one swipe of his firm hand, glorious sunlight rolling down his broad back, the freckles on his shoulders, the strength still clinging to his spine.

It intoxicated me. I begged him with the touch of my palms to roll onto me, to crush me into the mattress. His wet lips on mine, his tiny gasps of air pushed through my teeth, they were stirring something hot and buzzing beneath my skin, like one huge drop of pleasure spreading through my veins—the first drip of a snowmelt. The avalanche’s first drift of fresh, wild snow, reaching and reaching for the edge of the cliff, snarling for the clear burst of the air. 

It wants it. _Wants_ it.

Our skin grew hot and slick as I gripped his hair, the precious long strands he lets grow out a bit just for me. The silvery grey against the rough tan shade of my fingers. Stars reflected in rock. The bright lights bursting across the rodeo stadium sand.

I gripped his back, his firm thighs, the roll of his ribs, his rough cheek. He moved along me slower than we did when we were kids. Melting into me with the weight of his muscle and bone. Dragging his hair across my skin. Letting me hold him.

Hold him. Hold him. Hold him.

Hold on.

I thought as how it had been my only lasting dream in life since I was nineteen to experience the miracle of John Watson kissing me. His mouth on mine. His chest. His precious lips. The sounds he makes when he lets go and just feels, feels, feels.

My only lasting dream, and I got to wake up to it on Christmas morning. Wake up to him. The only him I’ve ever known. Ever wanted to wake up beside.

He licked across my lips with a final soft sigh before he pulled back to breathe. I thought in that moment that there was nothing so precious on this whole wide earth as John Watson’s sleep heavy eyes blinking above mine. As his swollen pink lips, wet from my own mouth, glittering in the Christmas sun. 

Because I was somehow sure in that moment—there was a Christmas sun. Far superior to the regular one.

He held my face in his hands. He looked like an entirely different man from the man who looked down at me in that motel room two towns away from Signal—wild and desperate and tinged with reckless fear. His jeans pushed down around his hips. His wide eyes on mine.

And he wasn’t the man who looked up at me with tears in his eyes leaning against our fence, holding me as I fell apart, promising me one day, one day, one day.

He wasn’t the man who told me he had the girls for that weekend, and that he wished he could go to the mountains with me, but maybe some other time, maybe next month . . .

No, this man looking down at me was _home_. He was waking up and kissing me good morning in our bed, reminding me I was still awestruck dumbstruck lovestruck and everything else. 

Reminding me I’d been caught in the loop of John Watson since I was nineteen, and I never wanted anybody to even try to cut me out.

“Little love,” he said to me then. His voice was hoarse and deep. 

I closed my eyes. He was like staring straight into the sun. He kissed each of my eyelids with wet brushes of treasured lips. I reached up and swiped back the hair from his face, tracing his scalp by feel alone. He rubbed his nose along mine.

We sighed. It was the sound of a thousand campfires together. A thousand misty mornings with the dew sliding down sunrise tent walls. There was just his mouth, and my mouth, and the warm space between the two.

I opened my eyes, expecting him to start pulling off me to get ready for the day. But when my eyes met his, he didn’t move. He didn’t even shift his weight.

I knew that face. I knew it like I knew the back of my own hand. It was impossible to look into his face that morning and feel afraid, or secret, or alone. Impossible to feel anything but _his_. Let the whole world see.

“My sweet darlin’,” he whispered to me. 

I burned with the overwhelming power of those words. Like he was spoiling me by drowning me in a river where I could still breathe.

“Sweet love . . .” He kissed my cheek. “Little love . . .”

I held tight to his ribs and spine.

“Why all this?” I finally managed.

He didn’t look ashamed. “You sayin’ I can’t go and enjoy my gift?”

An odd mix of shock and gratitude flowed through me. He never spoke like that to me. Never was so open with his words. So unwrapped and laid bare. 

I _loved_ it. It terrified me.

I held it in my palms like it would break if I moved too quickly. Like it could shatter. But then he kissed me, harder than he had yet all morning, all gasping and deep and rolling across my mouth, drinking me in, filling me with himself.

“John,” I gasped. He swallowed it whole with a moan like summer grass. I said it again and again, lost forever in the heat of his body on mine, his hands on my skin. I never wanted it to be found.

And you know what? That fragile gift I held in my palms—it didn’t shatter.

It strengthened, it grew and grew and grew, until I suddenly couldn’t imagine that I’d never woken up like this before, not where his words dripped down my bare skin like sweet honey, and he showered me with praises, kissed under my arms, across my chest. Kissed the dip just under my chin. The bones of my hips.

I couldn’t believe I’d never arched up into his hands like a budding rose, my blood in a holy rhythm of the old hymns from my momma, my scent mixed with his like the ripe bursting of spring. Of hot summer, dripping with sweet juices from a bruised peach. The slow, crackling heat of a lasso whipping the air. The endless kiss of a trickling stream.

We’d . . . we’d _never_. Not like that. Not so . . .

But there aren’t words. Just like Wilma was always telling us—we don’t have words, and I don’t reach out and take his hand under the wide open sun, and he don’t kiss me where anyone else can see.

But he was kissing me then. Holding me to him like he’d die if there were space between us. Building that heat in me faster, faster, like his hands were born to touch my body and mine alone. To play my song.

And I thought, as I pressed wet lips to his neck, and whispered his name, and sparked bright heat up my spine . . .

I thought that maybe I didn’t need to go and explain anything to Wilma at all. She didn’t need to see us hug and kiss. Didn’t need to hear the ‘I love you’ neither of us have even spoken, and probably never would.

No, I thought, just as he gasped in my ear, his tongue swirling along my skin, and shivers erupted down my belly, the damp slickness between our thighs. As he kissed my swollen lips. Moaned.

No, my Little W will just hear me say his name. Hear me say, simply, “John.” 

John by the backyard fence that needs fixing, and John over the kitchen table, and John milking the cows. John helping his daughter and his granddaughter cook the Sunday roast. John handing me my boots. John taking the truck into town.

John looking back at me over his shoulder from a horse. John in a tent at sunrise. John picking a leaf from my curls by the light of the campfire.

“John,” she will hear me say, again and again and again.

And it will be all I could ever express.

And then she will always know. Will hear it and understand.

And so will he.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! My endless gratitude for the past year's worth of love you all have shown me. 
> 
> <3


End file.
